Considerations for regulating AI-enabled manipulation

Artificial intelligence has turbo-charged humanity's oldest persuasive tool, manipulation, making it granular, automated, and infinitely scalable. The EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) is the first statute to classify AI-enabled manipulation as a prohibited practice, yet the deeper, prior question is why regulate? This paper argues that AI changes the moral and practical calculus in three ways. First, as non-human intelligence and a force multiplier embedded across computational capabilities, AI can anticipate, simulate intention, and steer users beyond what privacy, consumer-protection, and competition regimes envisaged, leaving individuals and regulators defenceless. Second, hyper-personalisation, fuelled by vast behavioural data, enables systems to probe and exploit intimate vulnerabilities. Third, algorithmic scale makes manipulation non-rivalrous, transforming individual harms into societal risks for democracy, public health, and the environment. The paper thus offers normative grounding for the AIA's application and proposes governance tools treating data extraction and manipulative deployment as distinct regulatory targets.